How do I get my sustain pedal to work in Ableton?

I'm trying to use my old Roland PianoPlus 450 (electronic piano) as a midi controller in Ableton. Everything seems to work perfectly except for the sustain pedal. Ableton seems to recognize the midi events (CC 64) when I press down on the pedal and release it, but what I'm playing doesn't actually get sustained. Any ideas?

2 answers

jaredjost

contribution
1 answer 1 vote received

1 vote

Alright, so I finally got this working. The problem is that apparently old Roland electronic pianos incorrectly emit an 'all notes off' midi message when all the keys have been lifted. This tells Ableton to immediately stop all notes that are being played (even if the sustain pedal is being pressed). Through the use of MidiPipe I was able to filter out the 'all notes off' message (CC123) so that Ableton no longer received them and everything worked!

Since it took me a while to figure out how to get MidiPipe to do what I wanted, I thought I'd mention what I did to get it working in the end. I added a 'Midi In' pipe to receive the messages that were coming in from the piano ("hijack" option checked), added a 'Message Converter' pipe and mapped Control Change #123 to Control Change #002 (for example), and lastly a 'Midi Out' pipe to MidiPipe Output 1 ("pass through" option checked).

2 years ago|
0 comments

scottiedo

contribution
72 answers 73 votes received

0 votes

First, double check to make sure Live is receiving the midi event. I'm sure you've already done this but when you step on the pedal you should see the midi indicator light blink yellow in the top right corner of the Live window.

Now just because there is a light blinking it doesn't mean your Roland board is sending CC 64. You could test this by recording a midi clip and see if the 64 - Hold Pedal envelop has some envelopes.

Next, what kind of instrument are you trying to sustain. Some Instruments/patches don't sustain with the pedal. The default analog patch doesn't. However the default Operator patch does.